José Luís da Cruz Vilaça, founding partner of CVA, took part as a speaker in the lecture "Compensation in the private enforcement of competition law: a European and Iberian perspective", organised by IE University and the Pérez-Llorca law firm.

The lecture, which took place on 28 June in Madrid, was also attended by Juliane Kokott (Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the EU), María Vidales Picazo (Director of the CNMC's Competition Promotion Department) and Patricia Pérez (PhD in Law and Adjunct Professor at IE Law School) and was moderated by Juan Rodríguez Cárcamo (EU Law Partner at Pérez-Llorca). The aim of the lecture was to discuss the most pressing issues in relation to actions brought by private individuals for damages resulting from infringements of competition law (commonly known as "private enforcement"), in particular the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU, the academic perspective and the experience of the practical application of that case law by the Portuguese and Spanish competition authorities.

For the founding partner of CVA, "With the exponential increase in the number of class actions in competition matters and the amounts at stake, it is to be expected that the courts responsible for hearing them will be considerably overburdened. It is also foreseeable that this development, combined with the variety and complexity of the cases, will lead the Competition, Regulation and Supervision Court or the appeal courts to refer more requests for preliminary rulings to the Court of Justice. The success of private enforcement therefore depends on adjusting the response capacity of the courts involved at national level and of the Court of Justice of the European Union itself."